Green Party Convention: Left Rhetoric in the Service of Pro-Capitalist Politics – World Socialist Web Site

It never ceases to amaze me how certain individuals will continue to chase after political figures and agendas no matter how many times they have been failed by this entire system. These folks evidently still believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, they believe the next political savior is right around the corner: immature, incapable-of-learning-from-their-mistakes simpletons.

And these are the people who are now on board with “the green party” and its nobody stooge candidate. It seems that when Bernie finally revealed his true nature, these poor suckers (“one born every minute”) just picked up their tents and moved over to the next political savior they could find. And of course, the word “green” was enough to hook any of these “dumbed down” sheep.

There is an old adage that states, “Those who will not listen will have to learn the hard way.” And these sheep to the slaughter are about to learn the hard way: “the green party” is no different from the democrats or republicans, when it comes to being a fraud:

Green Party Convention: Left Rhetoric in the Service of Pro-Capitalist Politics

By Evan Blake
9 August 2016

On Saturday, at its convention in Houston, Texas, the Green Party of the United States officially nominated Dr. Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka as its presidential and vice presidential candidates in the 2016 election. The event, held at the University of Houston from August 4-7, was streamed live over YouTube, drawing over 4,500 viewers at its peak. The convention also involved the passing of several amendments, with the most significant one being falsely labeled “anti-capitalist.”

Stein’s 35-minute acceptance speech, in which she denounced the war policies of the government—albeit without mentioning the names of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—was a rhetorical shift to the left by the Green Party. The Greens are attempting to win the support of radicalized workers and youth disillusioned by the abject capitulation of Bernie Sanders to Clinton, in order to divert them back into the safe channels of bourgeois politics.

The left rhetoric of Stein and the Greens does not correspond to the reformist and pro-capitalist character of the party’s origins, history and program. In reality, it is a nationalist, bourgeois political party, based on sections of the upper-middle class, which fully supports capitalism, opposes Marxism and is hostile to the political independence of the working class. Where Green Parties have achieved influence or come to power, notably in Germany, they have supported austerity measures against the working class at home and war abroad.

The nationalism of the Greens was in plain view to those watching online Saturday, as the American flag emblazoned the screen during breaks at the convention. Following the path laid by Sanders and Donald Trump, the Green Party promotes a scrapping of the Trans Pacific Partnership from a protectionist stance, with many delegates holding signs that read “No TPP!”

In their pragmatic maneuvers, the Greens have formed an alliance with various pseudo-left organizations such as Socialist Alternative, which formerly supported Sanders’ run within the Democratic Party, and the International Socialist Organization. At the Democratic National Convention, held in Philadelphia in late July, hundreds of Sanders delegates from the so-called “Bernie-or-Bust” faction left the convention, and many have gone on to support Stein and the Greens.

Roughly half of the 500 attendees at the Greens’ convention—the largest in the party’s history—registered in the aftermath of Sanders’ backing of Clinton. Speaking directly to this new layer of supporters, Stein said, “On the day that Bernie Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton, the floodgates opened in our campaign for more volunteers, more ballot access drivers, more funding. We are a different campaign than we ever have been in history for having joined forces with you.”

Stein began her acceptance speech by demagogically shouting, “We are what democracy looks like! Let’s go all of us! We are what democracy looks like, and we are what political revolution looks like!”

In co-opting Sanders’ call for a “political revolution,” which he himself claims is now being carried forward by Clinton, the Greens are trying to have it both ways. They are simultaneously presenting themselves as an alternative to Sanders and as the continuation of his campaign, as though his complete integration into the Democratic Party and self-abasement before Clinton and the Democratic establishment had nothing to do with the real content of his so-called “political revolution.”

This cynical and false perspective obscures the basic fact that Sanders’ “political revolution” was from the very outset, as the World Socialist Web Site warned, an attempt, initiated on behalf of and supported by sections of the bourgeoisie, to head off and derail a growing political radicalization of workers and youth. In adopting Sanders’ rhetoric, the Greens are in fact exposing themselves.

Stein’s phony anti-war rhetoric

Toward the end of her speech, Stein addressed the issues of foreign policy and war, declaring, “In this election, we are deciding whether we will have a world or not going forward into the future. The day of reckoning is coming closer and closer… On the count of climate [change], and on the count of nuclear weapons and this insane nuclear arms race that we are once again headlong plunging into, and on account of these endless and expanding wars that are blowing back at us all around the world, we cannot afford to sit this one out.”

The anti-war rhetoric of the Green campaign is largely a recent innovation, as Stein for the most part has remained silent on foreign policy during her campaign up to now. In contrast to Stein’s denunciations of war and even the threat of nuclear war, the Greens’ platform document, adopted in 2014, is mostly silent on these fundamental issues, which are not mentioned in the “Call to Action,” the “Preamble” or the “Ten Key Values” sections and do not merit a single sub-heading in the remaining 66 pages of the platform.

While in other parts of her speech Stein mentions “war crimes committed by Saudi Arabia in Yemen and war crimes and occupation committed by the Israeli government in Palestine,” she makes no specific references to the past quarter-century of endless war mounted by American imperialism throughout the Middle East and North Africa, instead ambiguously criticizing “these endless and expanding wars.”

Stein conspicuously omits the names of any leading politicians—including Obama, Clinton and Bush—who have overseen these wars that have led to over one million deaths in Iraq alone, and hundreds of thousands more across Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries.

Her vague reference to “an insane nuclear arms race” obscures the central role played by the US, which is militarily encircling Russia and China and continuously escalating the threat of a nuclear third world war. Here, Stein also made no mention of the McCarthy-style attempt to brand Trump as an agent of Putin, and the anti-Russian hysteria being whipped up by Clinton and the Democratic Party.

In a recent campaign statement, Stein calls for a “50 percent cut in the dangerously bloated military budget,” advanced as a supposedly anti-war position. If she is accepting the government’s vastly underestimated annual military budget figure of roughly $500 billion, it would mean that Stein would evidently advocate instead a mere $250 billion annual budget.

Perhaps the greatest exposure of Stein’s pro-war perspective is her unreserved support for Sanders, whom last month she invited to join the Green Party and take her position as its nominee. Over the course of his presidential campaign, Sanders repeatedly stressed his support for Obama’s war policies—including the drone assassination program—and his belief that the United States “should have the strongest military in the world.”